Off to the Ballarat Base hospital this morning
for an what I thought was to be an ultrasound liver scan. It took a surprising amount of
time, about 30 minutes, in which he looked not only at my liver but
also pancreas and kidneys: it turned out
that the referral specified only “abdominal ultrasound”. He didn't find anything of
interest, so it'll be up to Dr. Turner to investigate next month.

Yesterday morning I woke up when there was a loud bang from the laundry, where the cats
sleep. I came in to find a somewhat distressed Piccola—and no Lilac. Further
investigation showed that she had somehow fallen down behind the clothes dryer, and couldn't
get out. I moved the drier, Lilac came out, unhurt. End of story, modulo considering how
to avoid it happening again.

How did that happen? This was some time later, so it didn't have to be related. And we
couldn't find the missing fur in the laundry. Somehow Piccola is continually losing fur,
while no other cat does. Why? It's not a serious injury, but she could do without it.

I've been dragging my heels—again—with updating Yvonne's
computer, but it has to be done. I now have a disk I can put in there, containing a not
quite up to date version of her /home file system, but it needs a system on it.
Problem: the partition with the system I want to copy is on stable, which only has
connections for one disk. I've been building the other disk images on swamp, but I
can't easily copy partition contents from one system to another.

OK, I have a SATA to USB adapter—in fact, the one that came with the disk. Put that on the
disk, find a power supply, and I'm in business. Well, I thought so:

What happened there? Put the disk back in swamp, which is running FreeBSD 11-CURRENT, and it worked fine. So somehow we
have an incompatibility between -CURRENT and -STABLE. How can that
happen? GPT is a standard
that FreeBSD shouldn't change. In any case, there are several possibilities to work around
the issue, including attempting a repair
(despite GEOM's pessimism), or blow the GPT
structure away altogether and rebuild it. Either way, it meant Yet Another Backup, so no
more work on that front for today.

One of the stranger phenomena associated with Christianity
is stigmata, the appearance of wounds
matching the location of the wounds
of Jesus Christ, particularly those
inflicted in nailing him to the cross. I've never really thought much of it—until it
happened to me:

I've been meaning to upgrade our main systems for a year and a half. In that
time I've maintained a development system, stable, that has been getting closer to
its name as time went on. Today I finally finished preparing the new disk
for lagoon, Yvonne's system. The steps were:

Create a new disk on stable with five partitions: boot, two root file systems
(each 40 GB in size), swap, and the rest as the /home file system. The root file
system on my machines includes /usr, and effectively everything that is
release-dependent. The second root file system is for upgrades, though I don't know if
I'll use it.

Copy stable's root file system to the first of the new root file systems
with dd:

How did it work? The opportunities for error are everywhere. But it worked almost
completely without problem. The only issue I had was that I had forgotten to merge new
system user IDs into /etc/master.passwd, so I got error messages like this one:

Since the system isn't even running squid, that's benign. Updating /etc/passwd and /etc/group fixed
it.

The only other issue is with Facebook: she
can't play videos. That sounds like a flash issue, but it works with
Youtube. Found a potential reference on
FreeBSD forums, but for some reason I kept
getting ECONNRESET when I tried to access it. Mañana.

Every time I create a new UFS
file system, I go through lots of RTFM.
What are the optimal parameters? UFS is now over 30 years old. When it was written, a big
disk was 300 MB in size. Now a small disk is about 1 TB. But the default inode count bases
on the assumption that the average file is 4 fragments—in this case, 16 kB. And there are
these two parameters which seem to duplicate each other: -g avgfilesize specifies
the average file size. The man page doesn't specify the default. -i bytes gives
the number of bytes per inode, by default 4
fragments, or half a block. But there's exactly one inode per file, so why do we need both?
Looking through newfs code makes your eyes go funny:

That's even stranger because this code can't be reached: there's a similar check when the
parameter is processed. avgfilesize is the value set by the -g option.
It doesn't get used at all in newfs. It goes into the guts of the file system, and
even there it's only used in one place, in /usr/src/sys/ufs/ffs/ffs_alloc.c, where it
is used to set directory sizes. It defaults to AVFILESIZ, which is defined
in /usr/src/sys/ufs/ffs/fs.h. The comment there reads:

* Grigoriy Orlov <gluk@ptci.ru> has done some extensive work to fine
* tune the layout preferences for directories within a filesystem.
* His algorithm can be tuned by adjusting the following parameters
* which tell the system the average file size and the average number
* of files per directory. These defaults are well selected for typical
* filesystems, but may need to be tuned for odd cases like filesystems
* being used for squid caches or news spools.

svn blame shows that this was revision 75377 (doesn't that look like it's octal?):

Directory layout preference improvements from Grigoriy Orlov <gluk@ptci.ru>.
His description of the problem and solution follow. My own tests show
speedups on typical filesystem intensive workloads of 5% to 12% which
is very impressive considering the small amount of code change involved.

I wonder if that still applies. In any case, it seems that it would have been better to use
the inode density variable for this purpose. The only other place it's mentioned is
in /usr/src/sys/ufs/ffs/ffs_vfsops.c, where there's yet another check that it's >
0.

Why is the inode density set to 8192? And why is the average file size not the same? But
this file system is nearly 2 TB in size. You don't fill a disk like that with 250 million
files. Current usage is:

A call from Wayne Jones of JG King today, regarding the letter I sent on Monday. He says that he didn't get the
letter until yesterday—3 days for a local letter. Part of that, I'm sure, is the
inefficiency in JG King's office. But he didn't even try to address tomorrow's deadlines.
Instead, he made an appointment for a site inspection with Evan, his superior—on 15 July!
He also said that they would not fix this problem:

It seems that more fur has been removed round the original, which is already showing a
scab. How does this happen? She has only recently been allowed outside again. Is she
scraping through some narrow passageway and removing it? It's difficult to understand what
mechanical influence could cause it.

Taking the photos of Piccola wasn't easy. My
camera went off without flash. I've had continual problems with flash since getting Olympus
cameras, but this time nothing I could do would get the flash to fire. Tried it with two
different flash units and two different cameras, and confirmed that the problem was with my
OM-D E-M1. Dirty
flash contacts? Got a cotton wool swab and rubbed over them. Yes, a surprising amount of
dirt there, but afterwards it still wouldn't work. Flash turned off? Yes, it seems from
the menu, but I couldn't turn it back on again.

After about 20 minutes of cursing and swearing, I found it: the camera was set to
“HDR”. I
suppose it makes sense under those circumstances, but wouldn't an explanation help?

Whatever is happening to Piccola doesn't seem
to be going away soon. We're coming to the conclusion that she's pulling out her fur
herself, possibly because of itching. Here the difference between yesterday and today:

A year ago we last made
Osso buco. Today we tried again, and in
our disorganization didn't find the recipe (I had forgotten to include it in the recipe index). Today we did it relatively similarly,
but the quantities were all wrong. Still, we've decided that it tastes better braised than
sous-vide, so I've updated the recipe (and put it in the index).

Clearly what's going on with Piccola is not
normal. It can't be an accident, since the wound continues to increase in size. She must
be biting it out herself. But why?

Could it be mange? It's not quite typical
of mange: it tends to attack dogs, not cats, and it's contagious. But our other animals
have no signs of it (yet). In addition, it doesn't look typical for mange. But then I
found this
page, showing something very similar:

Admittedly they called it “unusual”, but it looks surprisingly similar. To Pene's tomorrow
for confirmation.

I made the probably incorrect decision to copy my /home file system across the net,
using a combination of tar to move large quantities of data and rsync to fill in the gaps. Speed was not a
significant issue with tar—I got up to 50 MB/s—but it was an issue with rsync,
where speeds were closer to 3 MB/s. But it seems that rsync filled in the gaps too
well: this morning I came in and found that the copied file system was 20% larger than the
original.

How could that happen? I have a number of files that are being loaded at a trickle by
the BitTorrent protocol, which copies
blocks at random. The file size is set to the final size, but the files are full of
holes—sparse files. tar
copies them correctly, only the blocks that exist, but that's not the typical way of doing
things. It seems that rsync just reads the file from start to finish, and
the system obligingly returns zeroes where there's a hole.

So: what to do? rsync has an -S option, which, in the words of the man
page, handles sparse files efficiently. What does that mean? I tried it, but it didn't
skip the holes either. It's not even clear that rsync won't change a correctly
copied file when it examines it. At the moment it looks as if I will need to find all my
sparse files and find something that will recreate them correctly. Another tool that
doesn't do the right thing is cp, at least under FreeBSD, though it seems
that GNUcp has support for sparse
files. To be investigated.

Over to Pene Kirk's today with Piccola, whose
fur loss continues. Pene didn't think much of my idea that
it's mange, and gave her something to
lessen the itching. It could take a day or two. Hopefully she's right.

We also took the other animals for vaccination. Zhivago was particularly welcome: last time he was there, he had helped
bring Gypsy into heat, so we decided he was something like a godfather. Here his is with
his godpuppies:

Over to Kleins Road today for the final cleanout of the house. That's done, but the garage
still needs work. A far-too-small skip arrived today. I had ordered the same size (4 m³)
that we had ordered last time, but this one was much smaller. My best guess is that last time they didn't have the
size we ordered, so they gave us a bigger one at the same price. I wonder if we'll get all
our junk in. Back home, offered a whole lot of it on Freecycle. Judging by the response, it looks as if
we'll get rid of a fair amount.

Since moving to Stones Road, we've been feeding our dogs in completely different places
pending the construction of feeding pens: Zhivago got his meat outside the front door and the rest inside, Leonid got fed in the dog run at the back of the house,
and Nikolai got fed outside the laundry, near
the shed.

Finally we have feeding pens, two of them. Two? Why not three? Ask Yvonne. Here they are with the right gate open:

That's exactly where we had been feeding Leonid previously—in fact, we didn't even move the
right-hand stand. And how did they take to it? Zhivago, the old dog who learns no tricks,
got fed outside, and took to it with no issues. Nikolai took a bit of a look and then ate
his food. And Leonid was terrified! He didn't touch his food, and spent all the time the
wrong way round in the pen waiting to be let out. Even after that, when we gave him the
food outside, he hardly touched it. What's his problem? Is he scared that, like the
electric fences, it might bite him?

That wasn't the only issue. After Nikolai finished his food, he just climbed out of the pen
and came to the laundry door. We're still wondering what to do about that.

Over to Kleins Road this morning to tidy out the remaining mess in the garage. Craig Mayor
came along to do the lifting, but it quickly became apparent that I couldn't keep up with
him. Got through about a third of the boxes before my back started complaining; it looks
like I'll have to do a couple of hours at a time over the next few days. I was right not
just to throw everything out. I found a number of interesting things, including old letters
and a large number of issues of AUUGN. And somehow throwing out
all these old things still hurts.

My camera is sold again, for the third time, this time to a legitimate buyer in Australia. But he didn't pay
immediately, so I decided to send him an invoice. And that offered only some express
option for about $27. I had offered standard shipping, which eBay calculated at $16.20.
Yes, I could change the shipping option, but it didn't get applied.

Went through the maze of twisty little menus and found another page, “print postage label”,
which also offered a comparison of postage charges. But they didn't match the Australia Post prices. Some were higher, some were
lower. And then I found an indication that the buyer had specified express shipping. Did
he really? While pondering this, discovered I could no longer access the “send invoice”
option: he had paid. Trying to print a label asked for a charge of $22.80—apparently in
addition to the postage he had already paid.

It took me a long while to discover that eBay has its own
postage rates, apparently sanctioned by AusPost. The whole thing is thoroughly
confusing, typified for example the statement: “Buy 200 pack - $340.00 ($1.70 each) Please
note: There are 20 boxes per pack.” And of course there's no option to pay $22.80 on that
page. Interestingly, Australia Post themselves sell express post satchels for $14.80.

I'm a little ambivalent about that. What happens if there's a fire and nobody can get there
to unlock it? What use is the place then? On the other hand, is there a real danger that
people might vandalize it? Why would they?

And who decided where to put the signs? They've put one at the end of Kleins Road, not a
bad choice for people coming
from Berringa. But there's one at the
end of Tantaus Road. Anybody coming from that direction knows about the place already.
Clearly the most important place for a sign is on the turnoff from the
main Ballarat-Colac
road. And there's none there. I'm baffled.

Yvonne has noted with pleasure
the Hebes along the east side of the
Kleins Road garage, and decided she wanted them somewhere in Stones Road. Where?
After some decision, we came to the conclusion that they would fit nicely along the south
side of the driveway:

Took some last photos in Kleins Road this morning, in particular of
an Acacia baileyana which I
thought was blooming particularly early (it wasn't). But the sun was shining brightly.
Could the camera handle it? To be on the safe side, tried a hand-held HDR series. I don't
think it was worth it. Which one is it?

It's been nearly 7 months since we put the Kleins Road property on the market, and almost as long since anybody was
interested enough to come and look at it. Time for alternatives. Did a little work in the
garage, clearing yet more junk, but mainly it was preparation for the sale. We're putting
an advertisement in Horse Deals, though
I'm concerned that there's too much emphasis on horses. There are others as well, so we've
prepared another web page to describe it. I
wonder if it will be more successful than the page for
Wantadilla.

Photos of the house? By the thousand, literally. But it's amazing how few are appropriate
for selling the house.

Why suspected spam? I've seen
this before: their mail filters are so stupid that they don't recognize digital
signatures when they see them. Their customers are typical non-technical, so they don't
even give them the chance to choose for themselves. What advantage is the service? They
would be much better off using gmail. More
rants here.

House photo day today, and lots of photos to
process. One of them had an error while reading it in from the camera (why does this happen
so often?): only 2 MB of 18 MB got read. Not surprisingly, DxO Optics “Pro” complained. But I couldn't get it to forget, even after reading the correct image again.
Finally something persuaded it—maybe it was just a timeout. And when I started
processing, I got the message:

Decades ago—in fact, in 1958—I discovered a lump in my chest under the left arm. My mother
carted me off to the Royal Children's Hospital, where they diagnosed a
harmless cyst.

It's never gone away, but in the last couple of days it swelled up and got inflamed. What's
causing that? Whatever it is, it was time for a doctor to take a look, so into town to see
him. Yes, it's an inflamed cyst—I think he
said dermoid cyst, though the
description doesn't seem appropriate. Antibiotics for a week, and if that doesn't fix it,
he'll remove it. No concern about cancer.

Last month I had problems
with bread rising slowly. Today I had the problem again. On examining my notebooks, I
discovered that the starter for today's bread was taken from last month's loaf. Is there
something wrong with the starter itself? It didn't help that once again I started late,
this time to ensure it wouldn't have finished rising before I got back from the doctor. It
rose normally in the first stage, but despite keeping it in a warm oven, it hadn't risen
even as well as last time by evening, after about 9 hours. I took it out and left it to
rise overnight. But it looks like this starter strain has, for some reason, lost its
viability.

Chris Bahlo and Margaret Swan along for dinner tonight, and we discussed the CFA Safer Place
that I mentioned a couple of days
ago. Chris had more observations:

The solar panels are there for lighting. And they're on all night, every night, even
now in the middle of winter. What good does that do, especially when you can't get on
to the property? It's more a nuisance for the neighbours.

There's no water on site. There used to be a dam, but they filled it in. Imagine 500
people in there on a hot, windy day. Aren't they going to be thirsty?

What is the point of the paved areas? The ground was hard enough before, and this is to
be used in the middle of summer, where everything is dry.

There were adequate fences around the property before, but they tore them down and
erected new ones.

All in all, it's good that they've finally created this place, but they could have done much
better (and saved what looks like a lot of money) by doing almost nothing. Only the signs
(still inadequate) were really needed.

This morning, after 18 hours, yesterday's bread had still not risen any more. It was only about ⅔ the height it
should have been, and only about 30% higher than before it started rising. In principle I
should have thrown it away, but I was rather curious to see what it would look like inside.
So I baked it anyway. I wasn't prepared for what happened:

The top had originally been flat; now it had risen in the middle and stayed at the original
height at the ends. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm wondering if part of the problem might
not have been the way I forced it to rise. According to Pöt's instructions, it
should be allowed to rise in the oven at 50°. I usually do it much cooler, but this time I
did keep it at 50°. And that's what I did last time I had problems too. Could it
be that the surface of the bread cooked sufficiently to stop it from rising? I was going to
throw away this starter strain, but I think I'll try again, giving it much more time
to rise normally.

I still don't have satisfaction from JG
King about the kitchen appliances. It's good to have comparisons, and since Chris
Bahlo says that she had no difficulties with her appliances, it seemed worth doing some
comparisons, so over to her house today to take a look. There were three points:

Screw covers in cabinets: Wayne Jones claims that this is industry standard:

Yes, Chris' cabinets have covers too, but they're plugs, not stick-on pieces of
plastic. Still, this problem has now been solved, so it's academic.

Range hood: I couldn't find any A4 paper, so I used a single sheet of toilet
paper to see how well the extractor held it in place. It worked in all positions as
long as the fan was at least on 2; otherwise it just fell off. That's pretty much what
ours does too, at least in the middle. Even at full blast, it can't hold the toilet
paper on the edge.

Stove: The low setting works correctly. Here is our “large” burner on the left,
Chris' on the right, first on maximum, then on minimum:

Chris tells me that I've been unlucky with JG King, and that she was much luckier with
Simonds. But on reflection, I think
it's the other way round: JG King have been unlucky with me, and Simonds have been lucky
with Chris. She still doesn't have her garage door opener (same model as ours) working
correctly: the remote control wasn't programmed. I would have seen to it that that was
fixed; Chris put it on the tuit queue.

It's been a pretty dry winter so far—my new rain gauge measured about 25 mm for June, and
there was no rain between 18 June 2015 and 2 July 2015. The true values are probably somewhat higher, since the gauge seems
to measure too little. But this weekend has made up for it: over the past two days we had
14 mm (new gauge) or 17.3 mm (old gauge). To my surprise, the water tanks are full to
overflowing again. It also shows in one of the holes for the irrigation solenoids:

Since upgrading her system, Yvonne has been complaining that
Facebook videos don't work. Finally they've
ventured to say that the flash plugin needed upgrading. It was wrong, of course: none was installed. OK, we've been through
that before. But now we have PKGng to
do it all for us. Simply:

1 problem(s) in the installed packages found.
=> Please update your ports tree and try again.
=> Note: Vulnerable ports are marked as such even if there is no update available.
=> If you wish to ignore this vulnerability rebuild with 'make DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes'

Doesn't that fill you with confidence? I tried the DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes',
and sure enough, it installed. At the end I got the message:

===> Registering installation for linux-c6-flashplugin-11.2r202.481
Installing linux-c6-flashplugin-11.2r202.481...
If this is your first time installing flash each user must run:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

If you are updating flash each user must run:

nspluginwrapper -v -a -u

OK, tried that. No effect for me. Tried it for Yvonne. Yes, it worked, and she can play
her Facebook videos again. Case solved.

Well, not quite. For some time, I have been trying to use the new features of Google Maps. It keeps telling me that my system isn't
leet enough to run the full version:

To use the full Google Maps with 3D imagery and Earth view, your computer needs:

The latest version of one of the following browsers:
Google Chrome
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari

One of these operating systems:
Mac OS 10.8.3+
Windows 7, 8, or 8.1
Chrome OS with an Intel CPU
Linux (not using Firefox)

Up-to-date video card hardware and drivers. See below for more info.

I have all that, though I'm emulating Linux. But it still refuses. It's interesting to try
to understand why the combination Linux and firefox isn't supported, but more to the
point, this kind of restriction is making it less and less attractive to run web browsers on
FreeBSD. And that's really sad.

We've sold our pizza oven via Facebook. We
just weren't using it enough. And it took up quite a bit of space in the shed, which is
fuller than intended until the pergola or winter garden or whatever is built.
At least the purchasers were happy with it.

Continued working on the garage in Kleins Road today, and got close to finishing it. At
least we have the skip full, so the immediate pressure is off.

It's still immensely painful throwing all this stuff out. I salvaged the Tandem LXN some
time back, but I still have
a Microvax II, a MIPS-2000
and a Control Data Cyber 910 (really
a rebadged SGI IRIS). Here are the
first two:

The garage in Kleins Road isn't completely empty, but we're trying to get rid of as much as
we can by giving it away or selling it. The pizza oven went on Sunday, and I've sold my
Olympus
Zuiko Digital 18-180mm F3.5-6.3 lens, and today a Colin came along to collect the last
of the data projectors, so (very) gradually we're reducing our belongings.

The more I look at sending parcels by post, the more attractive AusPost's satchels look. Since I'm sending the lens anyway, also prepared my Olympus OM-D E-M1 for sending
in for repair. I'll have to make do with Yvonne's E-PM2 for a couple of weeks.
Hopefully it'll be the last time I have to send the camera in.

My garden photos have taken considerably less time since moving to Stones Road, as the
comparison between last year and
this year shows. Last year I had
68 photos; this year it's only 17. Still, it's surprising that there's anything there at
all. But in fact some things are looking happier than they did in Kleins Road, like
this Azalea and
this Cyclamen:

Wayne Jones and Evan Dower of JG King along today to take a look at things. It was clear that I wasn't going to get everything,
but the critical issues of range hood and stove (“cooktop”) were more difficult than I
thought. Evan seems to have the same problem with his stove, that the minimum flame wasn't
adjusted correctly—in fact, the way it was before they tried to adjust mine. Clearly he
doesn't cook, though he was grateful for the information that the things are adjustable.

And with the extractor it seems that Barclays have changed their mind. When Wayne from Barclays came, he
confirmed that it didn't work well. But Wayne Jones today produced an email from a John
claiming that it did, indeed, work well after Wayne had “fixed” it. At the best, that's
downright incorrect. At worst, it's an outright lie.

The real problem, though, is that JG King don't feel responsible: as Evan put it, they build
houses, not electrical appliances. I made it clear that they had implicitly recommended the
appliances by offering them to us, both at a premium. But I can see that we'll have an
uphill battle on both of them. It's difficult to convince people who aren't in the business
and don't use the things themselves.

I managed to get some concessions out of them, though: they'll pad under the doors to the
bathroom and the laundry, which may be enough to improve the appearance, and they'll do
something about this silly junction between the skirting boards in the main bedroom:

And the tapware? They're thinking about it. Once again, they don't have any difficulties
with it themselves. I've agreed to wait with the laundry and bathroom doors until we see
what it looks like with the built-up transitions under the door.

The trough (“pond”) around the verandah-to-be is supposed to be waterproof, and Brett
Chiltern painted it last
month, just before it rained. The result is that half of it washed off again, and
after the rain, the trough was full of bluish water. Today finally dragged out a pump and
started pumping it out. It wasn't easy: I've mislaid the instructions for the pump, and it
needs priming before use. Finally got it pumping, and the fittings leak like a sieve:

The Olympus Air A01 has nothing to do with Olympic Airways, nor does it have anything to do with
austerity. It's a camera (or maybe just half a camera) made by Olympus for their
Micro Four Thirds
range. It's basically just a sensor, an (electronic) shutter and
an 802.11 link. All the complicated
things are done by a smart phone that you need in order to use it at all. So what's the
advantage? It's trendy, of course, but is that an advantage? Here's the camera with a
lens the same size as the one that Yvonne has on her
E-PM2. The
result is bigger:

In the images above, the A01 lens is (barely) shorter than the A01 itself. The lens on the
E-PM2 is collapsed, and it's still deeper than the camera. The A01 is only as wide as the
lens mount requires, but it's clearly a lot deeper than an ordinary μFT camera.

As if that weren't enough, the small size requires a number of tradeoffs: it has an
electronic shutter, which could potentially be a problem. In addition, there's no image
stabilization. That's the only Olympus μFT camera without it, so the lenses don't have
image stabilization either. If it takes off I can see at least one of two undesirable
developments: buyers will buy their lenses from Panasonic, who uses lens stabilization, or
Olympus will introduce stabilized lenses, adding to the price for most users.

So why didn't Olympus simply continue the E-PM range? The E-PM2 is the newest, introduced
in September 2012, nearly 3 years ago. Where's the successor? Since then Olympus has
introduced 6 new cameras: the E-P5 in the normal Pen range, the E-PL6 and the E-PL7 in the “lite” range, and no
less than three OM-Ds. It's clear which ranges are selling well, and the price I paid for
Yvonne's camera (Australian $299 with standard lens) reflects this.

But why does the E-PM2 sell so badly? I'm actually pleasantly surprised by what it can do.
But I have to agree with this article, from which the photo above comes, when it writes “Olympus E-PM2 Is
Small, Speedy, And Sleek, But Its UI is Not”. A camera of that size can't fit all the knobs
that make the E-M1 so much easier to use.

But how does this compare to the smart phone solution? The smart phone doesn't
have any buttons or knobs, though potentially it could have multiple touch areas for
people who like that sort of thing. I can't see how the user interface could be even close
to as good as the “bad” E-PM2. Certainly you're not saving space or gaining ease of use
with the thing.

About the only thing of interest is that Olympus is publishing the interface to the camera.
As this article suggests, that could potentially allow people to hack it in ways that
the manufacturer didn't think of, rather like the Canon Hack Development Kit. But I'm not holding
my breath.

I revisited this article in December 2017 because one of the images had gone away. So,
it seems, has the “camera”. Olympus no longer even mentions it on their web site.

It's also interesting to note that the discrepancy is always in the order of 1 to 2 mm,
independent of the actual rainfall. That would tend to confirm the hypothesis. Today I
took the new gauge out and weighed it after emptying: 172.3 g. Then I left it to dry out,
which it didn't do by the end of the day. The opening of the new gauge is 38.4 cm², so 1 mm
of water corresponds to 3.84 cm³. It's difficult to believe that the sides collect that
much water, but we'll see.

What's causing that? Pene Kirk thinks it might be stress. That would certainly explain why
she lost fur when Crystal was
outside. We thought it was some kind of fight, but the wounds looked exactly the same
9 months ago:

Call from Alexis of Reece
Plumbing today, wanting to speak to Wayne Jones. It took some convincing her that he
was at JG King and not here.

A couple of hours later I got another call back from her, almost unintelligible. She wanted
to know what was wrong with the tapware, and didn't seem to understand when I told her. On
the one hand we're getting a much faster response with Reece, but I still don't have the
warm, fuzzy feeling that they understand.

Recently the current FreeBSD core team
announced a (new?) code of conduct. On the one hand, it's good to make it clear that people are
expected to behave, and the wording is mildly amusing:

We do not believe anyone should be treated any differently based on who they are, where
they are from, where their ancestors were from, what they look like, what gender they
identify as, who they choose to sleep with, how old they are, their physical capabilities
or what sort of religious beliefs they may hold.

But why do we need a code of conduct? Any why shouldn't we treat people differently
based on some of these characteristics? I most certainly modify my behaviour depending on
the company I am in, and I'm convinced that this is the right thing to do.

The real issue is that codes of conduct are like software licenses: the $NICE thing
about them is that there are so many of them. Didn't everybody learn manners when they were
young? Respect your elders (that's prohibited by “how old they are” above). Help disabled
people when they need it (also prohibited by “their physical capabilities”). Behave
gallantly towards the fairer sex (now dying out, but also prohibited above by “what gender
they identify as”). Try to treat people the way you think they expect to be treated. About
the only thing that many people may not understand is that different cultures have different
sensitivities:

remember that cultural standards differ, and that what may seem to you to be a very mild
statement can be deeply shocking to another.

That's directly related to
the Charlie Hebdo
shooting. Clearly I disapprove of the shooting, but I also disapprove of Charlie Hebdo's deliberate lack of sensitivity. And
the new code of conduct is ambiguous about this kind of issue: the two quote above say
“don't distinguish on the base of religious beliefs” and “cultural standards differ” (and
implicitly “behave accordingly”).

When we moved in, now
nearly 3 months ago, our main priority was to put things somewhere where they weren't in the
way. The result has been that two rooms, the “music room” and the guest room, are mainly
full of unopened cartons. And the TV room (sorry, “home theatre”) had a half-dismantled
cupboard for which we had no certain home.

Finally the volume of stuff convinced me: it had to go into the music room. Spent some time
completely dismantling it and reassembling it, which went surprisingly easily. Things now
look like this:

A call from Craig at Sinnysmurf (or something like that) Whitegoods, asking to come and take
a look at the kitchen extractor hood in the afternoon. Fine, though it's not clear what he
could find that Wayne didn't find last month. And half an hour later Jo from Barclays rang up, also wanting to send somebody (presumably Wayne again) out. Agreed to call
her back when I found out where Craig really came from.

Craig arrived, and I had to ask him three times before I understood that his company name
was “City to Surf Whitegoods”, and
that he was located in Napoleons. He wasn't as thorough as Wayne. He certainly didn't go
through the manhole into the roof: I don't think he would have fitted. He grabbed a handy
recipe that I had lying around and stuck it against the middle fat filter, fortunately only
slightly smudging it (not much fat finds its way up there), and said that if it would stay
in place on setting 2 and 3, but fall on setting 1, it was OK. That's the way all range
hoods work.

What kind of criterion is that? It completely ignores the difference in claimed
throughput. It worked on the middle third, but not on the sides, above the hot burners. I
told him that I didn't accept that the thing was working according to the specifications.
He said he couldn't do anything else, and left.

Later I got a call from Lorraine of Alantin
Services, the one who called me six weeks ago and claimed that I had
only just purchased the item. Today she had the results: it works as advertised, since it
holds A4 against the filter.

Do these people take me for a fool? Or are they fools themselves?
Apart from the fact that I didn't buy the range hood to hold paper to the filter surface, it
does not hold paper to the important filter surfaces. I bought a 90 cm
extractor, not a 30 cm extractor. Made my displeasure clear, and she said that she would
get a manager to call me on Monday, and then changed her mind and said she would contact GJ
[sic] King.

So why did Craig make this claim? Clearly it's in his interests to keep in with the big
suppliers. I'm not paying him, so why should he make trouble? But the fact that John (also
Alantin?) claimed that Wayne had found nothing wrong with the unit suggests that they're not
being completely honest.

It was addressed to me, so the information should be redundant. But I don't have it. Where
was it delivered? It seems that they think that having it waiting for me at the post office
is enough.

I'm reminded of the German Lufthansa: about
25 years ago I went to Frankfurt
airport to pick up somebody coming in from the USA. Arrival time came, and the status
display changed to “arrived”. And then nothing. Finally I went to the information stand
and asked what had happened. “Sorry, the ground conditions were too bad, and the plane was
diverted to Köln”. “Why does the status say
“Arrived”?”. “The plane was in Frankfurt air space at the correct time. What more do you
want?”.

When I worked for Tandem
Computers, I frequently travelled
to Paris. The hotels there are expensive,
and the rooms are small to the point that you can barely move around the bed. But I
discovered that things were very different as soon as you got out of the city. In
particular, I found two old but historic hotels, the Trianon Palace in Versailles, and the Pavillon Henri IV in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
Both were once part of royal palace complexes, and both are steeped in history. At the
time, they were also very run-down, and the prices were actually lower than the cramped,
nasty hotels in the city, so I preferred to stay there.

According to what I have been told, it was the birthplace
of Louix XIV
of France, though there's little to find
on the web, only on the hotel
web site. Certainly they have a small chapel to honour the exact birthplace (the
story goes that his mother was walking in the garden when she was overtaken by labour pains,
and couldn't make it back to the château).

And if that wasn't enough, there's the reference
to Henri IV himself, the king who came
from Béarn in the South-West (born
in Pau, it
seems). In his honour, a cook at the hotel created a sauce and named it after
him: Sauce béarnaise. Strangely,
this is not on the hotel's web site.

But Henri IV was better known for other things. He was probably the last king of France who
genuinely cared for his people, and was called « le bon roi Henri » ("Good King Henry").
The story goes that he once said « Si Dieu me donne encore de la vie je ferai qu’il n’y aura
point de laboureur en mon Royaume qui n’ait moyen d’avoir une poule dans son pot. » (“If God
continues to give me life, I will ensure that there will be no labourer in my kingdom who
doesn't have the means to have a chicken in his pot”). The Wikipedia article renders this
as “If God keeps me, I will make sure that no peasant in my realm will lack the means to
have a chicken in the pot on Sunday!”. It seems that this change (or interpretation) was
due to Louis XVIII.

In any case, the resultant dish was, of course, poule au pot, chicken in a pot, and that's the recipe that Craig smudged. It
wasn't easy to find a recipe, and in the end I chose three that didn't look too complicated.
And of course, they're French, and for some reason French web pages render terribly when you
try to print them. So I've copied them and made them halfway legible.

The big differentiation between the recipes is whether the chicken is stuffed or not. For
the sake of simplicity, we chose the first of the three. As described, after 2½ hours, the
chicken was falling from the bone:

It has taken 2 days, but finally my new rain gauge is dry. It now weighs 170.8 g, 1.5 g
less than when it was wet. That corresponds to roughly 0.4 mm of rain, far less than the
discrepancy I have been noting. In addition, the fact that it takes so long to dry out, even indoors, suggests that the
real discrepancy due to the water on the walls would have been even less. So what is it?

Cats are fussy eaters, and dogs aren't, right? Not if the dogs
are borzois. Over the last week or two,
both Nikolai and Leonid have started refusing various foods. Niko doesn't
like the raw chicken frames any more, and Leo doesn't like pellets.

What do we do? Feed them only those components first, and when they've finished
them, given them the rest. Leo begrudgingly accepts that, but Niko is stubborn. Today he
left at least half of his chicken frame, and I suspect he just buried the rest: no food at
all. And yesterday he hardly had anything. Do we continue or change his diet? Chris Bahlo
thinks that he no longer needs the extreme quantities of calcium that he did when he was
growing, so maybe we'll just give him beef bones instead.

And the cats? Since being more confined to the house, Piccola has put on a lot of weight. No fussiness on her
part; we're putting her on a diet.

In fact, as chance would have it, we had planned another iteration of my fake tagine anyway. This time, following instructions
from Mohamed Ifadir, I didn't fry the meat. Not following his instructions, I kept the
vegetables until later. This time round I've decided there wasn't enough in the way of
chick peas and courgettes, and the courgettes should have been cooked longer. Once again,
though, it tasted good, better than the poule au pot. Next time, though, I might consider
the alternative of really putting everything in at the start, but keeping the vegetables
dry.

Comparing various sources, it seems that the real temperature was closer to -6°, the
historical low temperature for Ballarat.

That wasn't all, though. While pottering outside in the afternoon, I noticed that the water
pump was running continuously. No taps on or leaks inside the house, so I went to check the
garden hoses. And then I heard a noise from the roof:

It seems that the frost burst the left-hand solar hot water panel. No hot water! And that
on a Sunday. Sent a mail message to Duncan Jackson and also left a message on his mobile
phone. To my surprise, he called back in the evening and told me that they'd have somebody
on site tomorrow. That's certainly a change from the other dragging issues with the house.

Good that it's 100% tested, but does that mean that it's now empty? I'm reminded of
a Monty Python (I think) sketch from
about 1972, taking off the fuel economy TV advertisements of the time (“how far can I drive
with 1 gallon of petrol?”). In this case, the car carried on for 110,000 miles. Great
enthusiasm on the part of the petrol company, but the driver said “But look at my car! It's
buggered!”.

We normally turn the air conditioner (heating) off at night. But yesterday morning it took
several hours for the house to get warm. Last night we left it running overnight, and that
was just as well. The temperature dropped to a measured -2.3°, only 0.1° warmer than the
previous night, and the air conditioner had difficulty keeping the temperature.

One clear reason is that it took forever to de-ice. De-icing is essential for air
conditioners heating: ice collects on the coil and needs to be removed again by reversing
the coolant flow and passing hot coolant through the coil. In my experience, it takes a few
seconds to melt the ice, and a little while to blow the resulting water off the coil. But
for some reason real world air conditioners take much longer. This morning I measured 18
minutes, and 40 minutes later it happened again—if there was no intervening cycle.
But at best that's only a 70% duty cycle. Why does it take so long?

Call from Duncan Jackson this morning to tell me that the plumbers were on their way, would
be there before midday, and that it was probably a safety valve that had failed.

Over to Chris Bahlo's for a shower. While there took applied the the A4 sheet test to her
range hood. Sure enough, it held the sheet when set to 2 or 3, and not when set to 1. That
says nothing about the relative strength of 2 and 3, of course, but it does suggest that a
hood with throughput less than 217 l/s can do it too. Took a look at the label, completely
illegible in its position, but cameras are your friend:

760 m³/h are 211 l/s, pretty much the same as mine. But this one holds the sheet of paper
in all three panels, while mine only holds it in the middle section.

215 odd litres are a significant volume. Our hood has dimensions 90 × 48 cm, and it's
located 64 cm above the surface—a volume of 276 litres. So the hood should be
capable of removing 78% of that volume every second. It doesn't come close.

Back home, and Russell from the plumbers was there. No safety valve: the panel had burst,
as I thought. He disconnected the circuit:

I asked him why there were no valves there, and he simply replied “That's the way we do it”.
Still, it didn't take him long to disconnect the thing, and if he leaves the caps here, I
can do it myself in the unfortunately not so unlikely event that it happens again.

Duncan called back later: the new panel should be there by the end of the week. In the
meantime we're on (expensive) electrical boost.

It's not much of an operation—just a small cut with local anaesthetic—but it's probably the
most significant operation I've had where I was conscious, and it was rather interesting to
try to guess what he was doing. The anaesthetic didn't last, and I needed a top-up. And it
seems that they didn't have the right size tools: some discussion with the nurse about the
fact that other clinics in the Ballarat
had taken all the little ones (whatever they were. Scissors? Something for scooping out
cysts?): it seems that
the Sebastopol clinic does
sterilization for the entire area.

Out it came, not in one piece, and it's off to the lab for a biopsy. I was expecting to
have the wound stitched up, but instead he put a length of gauze inside to soak up the
bleeding. Back to have it looked at on Friday.

Shaun O'Connor, whom I don't know, sent out a request on Facebook today, looking for a PC repairman. Not quite
my line of business, but in the interests of neighbourly help, I offered to take a look. He
had had error messages relating to the first disk, which he couldn't interpret, and somebody
online had suggested that he reset the BIOS to default values. That made a big difference:
he could no longer boot at all: “Can't load operating system”; doesn't that help pinpoint
things?

The machine wasn't your run-of-the-mill system: big tower, 4 nVidia video cards
(more than I have!), and 2 disks. Which one was he trying to boot from?

I'm so used to seeing different devices in that menu that it took me a while to note that
it did state which channel it was on. But it didn't make any difference: the same
nondescript message in each case.

OK, boot FreeBSD. Found an old disk, and it
booted, sort of—there was an interrupt flood from irq 19, which was some bridge or another.
I could see the disk—it had two partitions, 100 MB and 1.9 TB (not bad for a disk which
Shaun said was 1 TB). They're both NTFS
partitions, but it was the first that was bootable. I haven't seen that before on
Microsoft. I couldn't mount either partition, though.

Shaun was quite prepared to reinstall the system, but of course he didn't have any backups.
I suggested that he first try to recover what he could from the disk, and gave him an old
disk to do a temporary install of Microsoft. I wonder if that will work. And it shows once
again how really difficult it is to diagnose these things if you don't get good error
reports.

While looking at the information I had about Shaun O'Connor's computer, I checked about the
disks he had. WD1002FAEX. And they're 1 TB disks. So why did the fdisk output show
2 TB? Did Shaun accidentally overwrite the partition table? Juha Kupiainen came up with
the most likely answer: the two disks are combined
as RAID-0. That
explains a lot of things, in particular why he couldn't boot after resetting the BIOS to
default values (and yes, it does offer some kind of RAID). Of course, for every
complex problem there's a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong. I didn't have time
today, and I won't have time tomorrow, but hopefully we'll see a result on Friday. Of
course, that only explains the follow-on problem, not the original one. We'll see.

It's nothing new that Microsoft has obfuscated understanding file systems by referring to
directories as folders, but today, while
trying to find out how to work around Microsoft blockages and move a file from one directory
to another, I got the message:

Another cool night last night, though not as bad as on Sunday. The outside thermometer
showed a minimum of +4.3°. But there were clear signs of a frost, so out (barefoot) to do
some measurements with my infrared thermometer. To my surprise the lowest temperature was
-3.6°, fully 7.9° lower! If that difference also occurred on Sunday, the lowest temperature
would have been -10.3°.

Chris Bahlo has finally bought a Borzoi,
once again from Ron Frolley, and we came along for the fun. His house name is “Digit”, so
before we promptly called him “Finger”—not that inappropriately, as it turned out, since his
real kennel name is “Goldfinger”. Our dogs are all roughly black and white, but Goldfinger
is—wait for it—golden:

When we got home, we let them out with Nikolai and Leonid. We were in for a surprise,
though: Ron and Sally both said that he had a submissive character, but that's not at all
the way he behaved. He wanted to play:

Got a message from Warren Ure today, reporting discrepancies in traffic measurement between
his mother and her (unspecified) ISP. Not surprisingly, the ISP claimed more traffic. I
thought it might be something like my experience last year, where the router was compromised and used to relay traffic.
But no, it seems not: she's on satellite, and the traffic is measured even when the “modem”
is turned off. That doesn't make sense. Neither does the response of the ISP, claiming
that there can still be traffic.

We've seen this before—in fact, I've written a rant on the subject. I had associated it with digital signatures, but now it's
happening without it. Called up BigPond “support” (“what is your problem
today... silence”). It seems that their voice non-recognition system doesn't even
tell you what it wants to hear any more, but it doesn't understand me, not even when I used
the term “consultant”, which used to break out of the system.

Finally I got through with “technical support”, after about a minute. Other old-fashioned
systems offer you a choice of numbers, and if you know them, you can bypass this stupidity
in a second or two. But then they wanted to know what kind of connection I had. This time
it was a number press. None of their business, of course, quite literally, since I'm not a
customer. But I didn't get the choice of my connection. All they offered was: “1: ADSL 2:
wireless 3: cable 4: dialup 5: satellite”. Where's fibre? Where's NBN?

Pressed 1 (what difference does it make?) and was connected to somebody who told me his name
was Nix, which seems appropriate for BigPond. He is apparently one of the cleverer ones: on
the third iteration he understood that it was a question of email, and that it was being
rejected as spam. He then asked me the phone number linked to my account (there isn't one,
and it looks like he was back in his script book again), and then if I had a domain email.
What's that? Or “personalized”? Where was my email registered? Ah, I should talk to the
techies at LEMIS. I made it clear that
I am LEMIS, and he finally decided to escalate. As encounters with BigPond go, this
was one of the better ones.

Finally the transfer came through. BigPond wholesale sales. What a waste of time.

There are a couple of inferences from this exchange, though:

It seems that BigPond expects mail to come from big providers like Gmail or Hotmail. Possibly they treat domain names differently if they don't know them.
I wonder how long it will be before other ISPs follow suit, and I can no longer run my
own mail servers.

If Warren is with BigPond, there's a good chance that his mother is too. In that case,
there's a simple solution to her problems: change to just about any other ISP.

Yvonne has never liked my nasi lemak. But I
pointed out to her the two traditions: either with something curry-like (my preference) or
with fish and fried egg. When she found out about the latter, she bought some fish at the
Victoria Market, and we both had nasi lemak for
breakfast. Here my typical plate,
the Singapore style, and what Yvonne ate:

So why “almost”? I don't use SLRs any more. The last one I used was my Olympus E-30, which I sold a
couple of weeks ago. And the last one I bought (but have never used) is, coincidentally, a
Pentax SV, bought on 1 August 2010. But since December 2013 I don't
use SLRs any more: they have finally become obsolete.

Into town today to have the dressing removed from my cyst remains, and also to hear the
results of the biopsy. The latter was fine: benign. The former seems not to be as perfect
as it might have been: they pulled out the gauze, and put more back in, without
anaesthetic. Back again on Monday, hopefully for the last time.

How do I bring the “member” back online? The menu offers “Recovery Volume Options”, but
that just gives the option to create a backup. Once it's down, there seems to be nothing in
the BIOS that can recover it. Looking at the disk with a FreeBSD box showed that yes, indeed, at offset 144 GB or
so there are unrecoverable errors. I didn't search further: clearly we can't bring up the
volume completely.

I would have searched further for ways of faking a good drive, but Shaun is suffering
withdrawal symptoms, and coincidentally he found backups on his backup drive that were far
newer than he was expecting (only 4 weeks old), so he opted for reinstalling Microsoft on
the good drive.

But how? After going through lots of rigmaroles about keyboard layouts and accepting
licenses, the installation program came back and said “no disks”. OK, what does FreeBSD
say? Yes, it found /dev/ad1, but gpart found nothing useful on it:

Clearly fdisk is an old, worn-out magic word. It's interesting, though, how it can
find an MBR partition table
where gpart finds nothing at all. There must be something on the disk that
tells gpart and other modern programs that it's part of a RAID set. Certainly the
FreeBSD kernel knew that it was part of a RAID. But how do you overwrite that information?
In principle you overwrite the beginning of the disk with zeroes:

OK, this is this protection for the disk label. There was a way to fix that, but
how? disklabel—how old is that? 12 years ago I
wrote “disklabel -W appears to have been broken for some time”. Since then, though,
the -W option has been removed altogether. I seemed to recall some sysctl,
but which? Went through all the likely looking sysctls without finding anything
obvious. Finally Peter Jeremy came to my aid:

Of course! kern.geom.debugflags, bit 4. It's so obvious! Why did I forget that?
One reason is that searching my diary is keyword-based, and here I didn't have the keyword.
Once I did, it's clear that I encountered it 6 years ago.

By that time it was dinnertime, so enough for the day. Anyway, the disk is now usable.
More fun tomorrow.

After yesterday's fun came the immense fun of installing Microsoft again. It started off
badly: when it got to choosing the disk, once again it claimed that there were no disks.
But I discovered that it works better if you plug it in, and after that it went off and did
its installation. And of course I had to enter this license key thing. As instructed on
the OEM box, the sticker was to be removed and attached to the computer somewhere, in this
case on top of the case.

How do you read that? It was in the shade, on its side, and in a small enough font (about 6
pt) that not only old fogeys like myself can't read it, especially when the font makes it
difficult to distinguish between B and 8:

Next step: updates. Sorry, you don't have a network connection. Further investigation
showed that it didn't have a driver for the
Ethernet NIC. Asked
it to search, but it didn't find anything. It suggested that I check on the Internet. It
didn't even divulge what kind of NIC it was, not even the PCI IDs.

Then it occurred to me that there's a DVD for the motherboard. Put that in and searched.
Sort of success:

After a bit of reflection, I seem to have seen this before. Microsoft driver installation
software doesn't always understand what it finds. Is there an install program on the DVD?
Sure, plenty, at least 5 for NICs. Fortunately I now knew that it was Realtek, for which
there were only 2 drivers, for the 8139 and the 8111. Trial and error, and yes, I chose the
wrong one first: the correct one was the 8111. But finally I had a network connection.

Next two things in parallel: installing other drivers. There were 5 devices without
drivers: multimedia, 2 USB controllers, and random stuff that I've forgotten. That was even
more difficult from the DVD, which had many different drivers, none of which worked.
But it was found relatively easily on the web, though it took an eternity to install. On
the other hand, I couldn't find drivers for the USB controllers. Since USB seemed to be
working, I left that.

Then the eternal update installation, 203 of them. And of course at the end I had:

Why are all these errors unknown? Didn't Microsoft define them? Followed one of the “Get
help” links to confirm that there's still no help, so restarted the update installation for
the 15 failed updates:

Only three? Can't these people count? Restarted the installation, and sure enough, it
succeeded. Went to the update screen again: no updates to install. “Check for
updates”. Oh, sorry, another 28 to install. Yes, they really can't count.

Finally all was installed, and Shaun could pick up his computer. I may not know much about
Microsoft, but it's getting (marginally) less painful now that I understand its bugs.

Sous-vide or not sous-vide? Of the last three
times we ate filet, two were sous-vide, and the third I didn't comment on. So sous-vide it
was.

OK, I think we've had enough filet sous vide. The first time it was excellent, but the
second time we weren't so
convinced. Today was more like the second time. Next time we'll at least brown it a
little.

Chris Bahlo has found a new name for Goldfinger: Fedor, a misinterpretation of Fyodor
(Фёдор). She brought him with her to dinner today, where he distinguished himself by
crapping on the floor, something that surprised all of us. Clearly even house-trained new
dogs need a bit of time to adapt to the rhythm; Zhivago did the same thing when we got him, though I don't seem to have recorded the
fact.

One of the ingredients for my bread is caraway seed. Sure, you can get it in
any supermarket, for about $0.80 for 15 g. The trouble is, I need 20 g per loaf, or about
500 g per year. And in larger quantities it's much cheaper. I normally get it at the
Vietnamese grocery in Geelong, but for
some reason I forgot last time I went there. Last week we were
in Melbourne, and I tried in Minh Phat,
the Vietnamese grocery opposite the Victoria
Market, but they didn't have any. I did find some inside the market, for $5
for 55 g; clearly I could resist that.

But then Yvonne found some in the confusingly named
Wendouree Wholesalers in Delacombe. 1 kg for $11.50.
Finally a local supplier. If they had a web site, I'd check what else they have.

To Masters today to pick up an eBay purchase. Huh? Masters is a normal “Home
Improvement” shop, part of the Woolworths conglomerate. What do they have to do with eBay? They have a shop on eBay where they
sell things that aren't in their normal catalogue, and they'll either send it to you
normally, at a normal price, or you can opt to save money and pick them up at a shop of your
choice. That's what I did today: I had bought a sprinkler controller for $55, while the
closest comparable one in their catalogue cost $108. I suspect that mine is “last year”'s
model, but that's OK; that applies to a number of things on eBay. A clever idea of Masters,
something I predicted in last year's paper future of the Internet. Talking of 2034, I wrote:

Most purchases will occur on-line, and the few remaining shops will mainly exist to order
and supply goods available on the Internet. The exceptions will be fresh goods such as
food and some services where a view of the items in advance is desired, such as some
clothes. This will also have a profound effect on the economy: many companies, notably
shops and mall owners, will go bankrupt. The future will favour those who can adapt.

While at Masters, also picked up some plants, which showed the other side of the coin. I
wanted a rosemary bush, and there was a sign there offering them for $4. When I paid, it
was $12.99! I checked another kind, and it was $6.99. No worries, they gave it to me for
$4, but I suspect the real issue was that the $4 applied to something else, and the person
maintaining the display had been too lazy to put prices for everything. That's very much to
their disadvantage. When I got home I found that the plant in question, a
“Gallipoli” rosemary (apparently cloned
from a plant in Gallipoli) was more expensive because it had a donation to the Avenues of Honour project, thus presumably the
price difference, which presumably still goes to the project. So probably Masters is out of
pocket as a result.

Paradoxically, while writing this article, I looked at the Masters web site. Now the item I
purchased is featured on the front page. The direction may be correct, but the road is
still bumpy.

It's been years since we had a direct TV display. 10 years
ago I migrated to a projector, which implied displaying only pre-recorded programmes,
and when we got a real TV again a couple of years ago, we didn't have an antenna cable
handy.

All that changed when we moved to Stones Road, but there was still an obstacle: most TV
inputs, it seems, have a male antenna connector, but this one has a female connector, and I
had no suitable cables. Today I finally bought an adapter, and was able to connect it up.
That's particularly important at the moment, since our TV reception is again terrible. And
how about that, things weren't perfect with the TV, but a programme recorded at the same
time was almost useless. So it seems that my 10-year-old DViCO tuners may not be up to it (any more).

One advantage that the Kleins Road property still
has over the Stones Road property is the garden and
the flowers in it. We've moved
a number of plants, but there are still plenty left. For over a month now we have been
picking flowers,
mainly narcissus, but gradually
the season is over. But to make up for it, our first new plants here are flowering:

Since moving house, there are hundreds of people I need to inform about our change of
address. It's not overly urgent: mail will be forwarded until the end of May 2016, but
gradually we should do something about it.

Today we received no less than 4 letters from Centrelink, probably a good candidate to start with. Based on my prior experience
with their web site, I asked Google instead.
And that took me to this
page, explaining that I should go to https://my.gov.au/ instead
and update addresses with multiple agencies with one fell swoop. It went into extreme
detail about what could go wrong and what to do if it did. What it didn't tell me was how
to get started. OK, maybe this wasn't the base page, and it was far too cautious to tell me
how to find it. So I went to my.gov and looked there.

First I had to create an account, which was easy enough, modulo normal stupidity: I was not
allowed to have spaces in my password, the date was required to have leading zeroes,
and they have these stupid “Secret questions”, one of which I have to
answer Every Time I log in. And what are they? “What is the name of the
first street I lived on?” Heather
Grove, Nunawading, of course. “What
was the model of a car I learnt to drive in?”. The first was a CitroënID19. Anybody who reads this
diary can find that out. Should I really give those answers? No, of course not. Something
that nobody can guess, At least I was able to determine what one of the questions was: “What
is the use of these silly secret questions?”. It accepted it and also the answer,
suggesting that its bad language detector wasn't working.

OK, log in. And sure enough, it asked me “What is the use of these silly secret
questions?”. I answered:

What did I do wrong? I omitted the final full stop in the answer. This means that you not
only have to answer these questions, you really need to copy and paste them to ensure that
no character is out of place. I should try it with two spaces between the words to see if
that makes any difference.

But that's not enough. They want me to use a mobile phone, here
in Dereel where there's no coverage. And
every time I sign in, I get this page:

OK, finally set up my account. How do I update my address? That's back to the redirected Centrelink page, or something very much like it, now called https://my.gov.au/mygov/content/html/updateyourdetails.html. How you get there
I don't know, except by typing in the excessively long URL. And again it doesn't provide a
link to the page; you have to scroll down 3 screens, reading all the irrelevant detail,
including FAQ links, to read that you have to go back to the home page (link? Of course
not) and select a specific icon (which leads to https://my.gov.au/CredentialManager/accountManagement.jsp, to save further
pain). But this doesn't work! It shows user name, last password change date, and offers to
let me change the secret questions.

From here on my recollection gets hazy. There's no way to repeat the Odyssey, but it proved
that I first had to link at least one “service” (in my case Medicare or Centrelink) to the account. OK, I have
an online Centrelink account. Try to log in: wrong password. Repeat: wrong password. OK,
I give up. Create a new account.

Finally link my Centrelink account to the my.gov site. Since the address change applies
only to the linked services, it sounded like a good idea to enter the details for Medicare
as well. I had to enter my Medicare number, of course. Medicare numbers have the format
1234 56789 0, but that was too complicated for the form, which wanted me to
remove the spaces for it, instead of considering whether I had put them in the right place.
But it didn't work anyway: “Due to technical difficulties this service is not available”.
It worked an hour later.

FINALLY I was able to enter my new address details. But it didn't like them:

My TV reception has been flaky again lately, but a couple of days ago I saw differences
that pointed to the tuner cards: the TV received a relatively useful signal, but at the same
time the tuners recorded nothing useful. Now that I have a 4 output amplifier in front of
the devices, I removed the daisy chain to the second tuner and connected both direct to the
amplifier.

Today, checked while it was recording Al
Jazeera News on SBS. No recording! Into
the lounge room to watch it on TV. No signal, just a poorly worded error message.

Has SBS changed its frequencies? Ran a tune operation. It forgot everything it ever knew
about SBS; the other frequencies were fine. SBS has always been the issue, but the
difference has never been this bad before. Was it the amplifier? Connected the TV directly
to the wall. Success!

So it's the amplifier? Checked all the connections, connected back again, and it worked.
So did the tuners. So there are cable issues. Either the cables are damaged, or they
weren't connected properly. One of the biggest problems with these reception issues seems
to be that there is not a single problem, and it's difficult to trace it down 100% to one
place.

Call from Greg of Delta Floors today. He wanted to come out round 17:00 and fix the relatively minor issue of adhesive
seeping through the cracks in the floor. But he called me later and said that it would be
at least 18:00, which didn't suit me. So we agreed to put it off until tomorrow, when he
would call me to make a date.

The dark area is where her fur is coming back from the previous occasion, but she has
started another one just above. Yvonne took her to Peen's,
who gave her some Prednisolone, but
she suspects that the real issue is stress adapting to the new neighbourhood and new cats in
the area.

What do they mean, the warranty had expired? It's a two year warranty! And of course, they
had confirmed that it was repaired under warranty. But what's this claim that I had left my
camera “on open sun”? They're clearly right about the damage, but I most definitely didn't
leave it out in the sun, let alone twice: I first noticed this in November last year, but it got
worse a month later. Were I to believe Olympus, I would have left it “on open sun” twice. No way.

Sent a message off to the
German Olympus Forum, and got a reply pointing to a
number of reports, this one in
English. One of the affected users did an experiment: he held his camera so that the sun could shine into the
viewfinder—for less than a second! And that was enough to burn the viewfinder. On
the left, my damage, on the right an image from the forum:

It seems that the problem is related to the “diopter adjustment dial” (focus adjustment for
the viewfinder). With normal settings there's no issue, but when set to +2 dioptres (the
maximum), it seems to be possible to burn the viewfinder without trying.

OK, various postings in these threads show that Olympus know about the problem. So why did
they put a comment in there that blames me for the problem? And why don't they warn me
about how dangerous it is? I'm not very impressed.

Craig Mayor along today and connected up the fire-fighting tank. Now the high-pressure side
of the irrigation system is complete, so we started filling it up. The bore produces quite
a bit of water, 0.5 l/s, or 1800 l/h. But the tank holds 10,000 l, so it took over 5 hours
to fill up.

One of the questions I had was: was there a float valve inside? It's sealed, so the only
way to find out was to fill it up and see what happened.

OK, I was expecting that. What I wasn't expecting was that the water would flow into the
shed, threatening the UPS. I tried moving the UPS to some nearby cardboard, and... pulled
the plug! Pulling the input is harmless, of course, so Murphy decreed that it had to be the
output. All machines down!

Fortunately, bringing them up proved to be relatively trivial. I took the opportunity to
put eureka, my main machine, on a separate UPS, the one that I had used in Kleins
Road. It has the additional advantage that it has a much longer run time, since it only has
the one machine connected. But somehow my uptime here is no better than it was in Kleins
Road.